A gene ther­a­py leader stum­bles, Medicx­i's splashy 10-in-1 start­up play, a rad­i­cal HIV cure gets its shot​, and bio­phar­ma's new top 50

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It was a short week, but bio­phar­ma news didn’t seem to get that memo. If this re­port was help­ful in re­cap­ping it all for you, please do share it with your col­leagues.

Francesco De Ru­ber­tis’ 10-in-1 lega­cy play

Medicxi is known, among the Eu­ro­pean R&D cir­cles it trav­els in, for its hawkeyed bets on as­set-cen­tric biotechs. But founder Francesco De Ru­ber­tis is try­ing some­thing dif­fer­ent with Centes­sa, a phar­ma op­er­a­tion formed by rolling up 10 star­tups in the VC’s port­fo­lio — span­ning 15 pro­grams — in­to an in­te­grat­ed com­pa­ny with com­mer­cial as­pi­ra­tions. He is bring­ing new­ly re­tired Op­er­a­tion Warp Speed chief Mon­cef Slaoui along for this lega­cy play, with a slate of pri­vate eq­ui­ty and ven­ture in­vestors al­so on board for the $250 mil­lion crossover round.

“When I looked at each one, I asked my­self the ques­tion: Would I want to be CEO of any one of these com­pa­nies?” Saurabh Sa­ha, who’s been re­cruit­ed from Bris­tol My­ers Squibb to run Centes­sa, told John Car­roll. The an­swer, in most cas­es, was yes.

A rad­i­cal HIV cure gets its shot

Like all HIV re­searchers, Kamel Khalili is too fa­mil­iar with decades-long pur­suit of a func­tion­al cure, all end­ing in fail­ure. Is it time for his own rad­i­cal idea? Ja­son Mast takes us be­hind Ex­ci­sion Bio­Ther­a­peu­tics’ $50 mil­lion launch round to dis­sect a new ap­proach 40 years in the mak­ing: a sin­gle-shot ther­a­py that would use CRISPR to ex­cise the HIV genes hid­ing in hu­man DNA, and the 69-year-old Iran­ian-born poly­glot be­hind it. “It was one of the last tech­niques that some­one had pulled out,” as a fel­low sci­en­tist puts it, and one that was met with its share of skep­ti­cism and NIH grant re­jec­tion. And yet, there might just be enough rea­son for cau­tious op­ti­mism that Khalili has in­vent­ed one of the ar­se­nal of weapons ex­perts think will one day take down the virus.

Top 50 bio­phar­ma com­pa­nies, 2021

Here’s one more way Covid-19 has shak­en up the bio­phar­ma in­dus­try. It’s giv­en us a brand new list of the top 50 pub­lic com­pa­nies in the busi­ness of drug de­vel­op­ment, af­ter Wall Street got over the fear of a glob­al pan­dem­ic and en­su­ing lock­down. On top of the some­what an­tic­i­pat­ed as­cent of com­pa­nies like Eli Lil­ly, Mod­er­na and BioN­Tech, oth­er play­ers are mak­ing sur­pris­ing ap­pear­ances. Check out the full list com­piled by Bloomberg an­a­lyst Sam Faza­li here.

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